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One of the key ways of trying to drive business to your website,
is to use search engine marketing.
When trying to find a travel product,
many users turn to their favorite search engine and enter phrases,
known in technical terms as keywords, to describe what they're looking for.
The search engine then goes through its database, and extracts a list of those
sites that it thinks will most accurately answer the question.
And thus should satisfy the information needs of the user.
Exactly how search engines arrive at an answer is a trade secret.
But each uses its algorithm to try to deliver answers,
that are relevant to surfers so
that they will continue to use it as their search engine of choice in the future.
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Although in certain circumstances a search engine may
accidentally discover your site all on its own.
In most cases you will have to make each engine aware of your existence
by going to the site and filling in a form, telling it your domain name, and
sometimes other information about your site.
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Although Google is a dominant player, there are several other search engines
out there aimed at particular geographical or special interest markets.
So hotels need to take the time to investigate,
which search engines are actually being used by their target customers.
Once the engine has been alerted to your existence,
it will send a special piece of software, known as a spider, along to examine your
site, try to figure out what each page is about, and include it in its database.
Exactly how these spiders perform these classifications,
is based on a constantly changing secret algorithm.
But certain factors are known to help increase your ranking.
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You should note however, that this changes very frequently, and
also that each spider has it's own individual idiosyncrasies.
So what is true now,
may not necessarily be true when you start to optimize your pages.
SEO techniques can be classified into on-page search engine optimization, and
off-page search engine optimization.
For the former, one of the most important issues is page structure.
To make life easy for
the spider, each page on your site should concentrate on just one subject.
Focusing on a single issue, and
moving from the general to the specific in the text of your page,
helps the spider to more thoroughly and accurately figure out, the subject matter,
resulting in more accurate classifications, and thus higher listings.
So instead of having a limited number of pages on your sites.
Each trying to be all things to all people, you should break your content
down into smaller, more compact and more specialized pages.
Which the spider can analyze and classify more easily.
As discussed in our section on content,
the care words need to be featured prominently.
Most search engines now advise that you should use the relative keywords
frequently, but not obsessively.
This is because in the past, page designers use tried to fool the spiders,
by using strategies such as word stuffing.
Including a word hundreds of times in the background of a page
in a deliberate attempt to influence the classification process.
However once a large number of sites started doing this,
it became in Ineffective as the search engine companies changed
the spider's classification algorithm.
And now repeating the same word or
phrase too many times will decrease, rather than increase your page's ranking.
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As mentioned earlier, rather than trying to fool the spider,
a better strategy is to focus on providing excellent content.
With the words that the user cares about featured prominently.
With the result that the pages will naturally rise to the top of the pile.
While in the past on-page search engine optimization was the key issue.
Recent changes to the Google algorithm, now place higher emphases
on off-page issues, particularly the quality of links from other websites.
The search engine's rational for making this significant change is quite smart.
While on-page elements can be manipulated relatively easily, it's much
more difficult to artificially manipulate off-page elements such as links.
Now to get well positioned, the key issue is having quality content.
In other words, pages to which people would want to link.
Links from social media, from blogs, from Facebook, Twitter and
YouTube, work particularly well,
since these indicate that people are talking about your content.
And if people are talking about it and
linking to it, it might just be the content that Google
wants to put in front of people asking that relevant question.
Peter O'ConnorProfessor of information systems, Director of the MBA in Hospitality Management
Nicolas GrafProfesseur
